Latin American Music Review

The encyclopedia volume referenced above was in the making for over two decades. In 1980, it was proposed at a meeting of UNESCO’s International Music Council and the Brazilian National Committee that Malena Kuss take charge of the coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean for its “The Universe of Music: A History” project, to which this tome corresponds. Kuss later enlisted the assistance of Samuel Claro Valdés in coordinating the Latin American portion of the work and that of Olive Lewin and Maurice Gordon for the Caribbean. This daunting effort led by Kuss eventually turned into a multivolume project conceived of as a single unit; only Volume 1 is reviewed in this essay. Overall the series will contain 150 contributions by over 100 scholars from 36 different countries, approximately 30 hours of recorded selections, and extensive bibliographies. Volume 1 is the first of four volumes. Volume 2, published in December 2007, is called Performing the Caribbean Experience; Volume 3, which will be published in two parts, will be titled Latin America: Islands of History; and Volume 4 will be named Urban Popular Musics of the New World.

The approach used in this encyclopedic history is novel compared to approaches used in comparable works such as the Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana and the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, Volume 2: South America, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. For one, it is claimed on the dust jacket to be the first comprehensive treatment of the topic in English. In addition, the most knowledgeable scholars from around the world were commissioned to write the entries. Thirdly, the theoretical underpinnings of the work are of note. States Kuss (ix):

This work was conceived to empower Latin Americans and Caribbeans to shape their own musical history, privileging their modes of representation and traditions of scholarship. It also was conceived to emphasize [End Page 99] the role that music plays in human life. As such, it highlights the meanings that traditions carry among practitioners, as seen mostly through the lens of cultural insiders.

A view of history is advocated by Kuss in which regions and cultures are not all lumped into a dehistoricized, homogeneous mass. In this age of globalization and reaffirmation of local identities, she sees history as “an infinite number of intersections of time, place, and peoples” in which all traditions have the same value, are heterogeneous, and need no synthesis (xvii). Drawing upon the work of Eric R. Wolf (1982, 6), she adopts a “neutral model of history” — defined as “a web of temporally and spatially changing and changeable set of relationships, or relationships among sets of relationships” — as a “non-value laden grid” on which to present the various authors’ contributions (xvii). Within this overarching framework of multileveled intersections, however, she stresses that “each intersection or nodal point represents an interplay of culturally value-laden factors” (xix). Musicologists specializing in Latin America are beginning to find ways to counteract colonialist and self-colonized discourse, states Kuss (xix), so this would appear to be her personal contribution. She expects that this multi-volume work will stimulate related research and hopes that coverage at the local level in the series will assist “in some measure to the eradication of essentialisms and to critical reassessments of the infinite ways in which cultural representation still relies on criteria and conceptual frameworks developed within the Eurocentric sphere of influence, including some models of cultural criticism stemming from vastly different historical experiences” (xix).

Although this encyclopedic history adheres to this agenda, Kuss clarifies that contributors to the volumes were allowed to follow their own approaches and perspectives when writing their entries. Since the...